Postcolonial Literature: Volume I Edited by Ato Quayson Frontmatter More Information

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51749-2 - The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature: Volume I Edited by Ato Quayson Frontmatter More information

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

* VOLUME I

Postcolonial studies is attentive to cultural differences, marginaliza- tion and exclusion. Such studies pay equal attention to the lives and conditions of various racial minorities in the West, as well as to regional, indigenous forms of representation around the world as being distinct from a dominant Western tradition. With the consol- idation of the field in the past forty years, the need to establish the terms by which we might understand the sources of postcolonial literary history is more urgent now than ever before. The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature is the first major collaborative over- view of the field. A mix of geographic and thematic chapters allows for different viewpoints on postcolonial literary history. Chapters cover the most important national traditions, as well as more comparative geographical and thematic frameworks. This major refer- ence work will set the future agenda for the field, whilst also synthesizing its development for scholars and students.

A TO Q UAYSON is Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His publications include Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (1997), Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (2000), Calibrations: Reading for the Social (2003) and Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (2007). He has edited Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration (2007) and co-edited Rethinking Postcolonialism (with David Theo Goldberg, 2002) and African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (with Tejumola Olaniyan, 2007). He is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51749-2 - The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature: Volume I Edited by Ato Quayson Frontmatter More information

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

VOLUME I

Edited by ATO QUAYSON University of Toronto

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB28RU,UK

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For Kamau

Contents

Contents of Volume I

Notes on contributors page xi Acknowledgments xxii Chronology xxiii

1 . Introduction: postcolonial literature in a changing historical frame 1 ATO QUAYSON

2 . Postcolonial fictions of slavery 30 GLENDA R. CARPIO

3 . Postcolonialism and travel writing 58 GARETH GRIFFITHS

4 . Missionary writing and postcolonialism 81 ELISABETH MUDIMBE- BOYI

5 . Postcolonial auto/biography 107 PHILIP HOLDEN

6 . Orality and the genres of African postcolonial writing 137 UZOMA ESONWANNE

7 . Canadian literatures and the postcolonial 171 WINFRIED SIEMERLING

8 . Postcolonialism and Caribbean literature 215 ELAINE SAVORY

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9 . Postcolonialism and Arab literature 250 MUHSIN AL- MUSAWI

10 . Postcolonialism and postcolonial writing in Latin America 288 (a) Postcolonialism and Latin American writing, 1492–1850 288 FRANCISCO A. ORTEGA (b) Postcolonial writing in Latin America, 1850–2000 309 MARCOS P. NATALI

11 . Postcolonial writing in South Africa 329 CHRISTOPHER WARNES

12 . Postcolonial literature in Southeast Asia 352 RAJEEV S. PATKE

13 . Postcolonial South Asian poetry 385 G . J . V . PRASAD

14 . Postcolonial writing in India 412 ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR

15 . Postcolonial writing in Australia and New Zealand 446 JULIAN MURPHET

16 . Indigenous writing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand 484 (a) Indigenous peoples’ writing in Canada 484 DANIEL HEATH JUSTICE (b) Indigenous writing in Australia and New Zealand 511 ANNE BREWSTER

17 . Postcolonial writing in Ireland 539 JOE CLEARY

18 . Postcolonial writing in Britain 571 JOHN McLEOD

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19 . Postcolonial writing in France 604 DOMINIC THOMAS

20 . Postcolonial writing in Germany 620 SARA LENNOX

Contents of Volume II

21 . The language question in India and Africa 649 (a) The language question in India 649 DEBJANI GANGULY (b) The language question in Africa 681 BHEKIZIZWE PETERSON

22 . English and the development of postcolonial literature 703 GABRIELLA MAZZON

23 . Religion and postcolonial writing 739 JAMIE S. SCOTT

24 . Postcolonial responses to the Western canon 771 ANKHI MUKHERJEE

25 . Island writing, Creole cultures 802 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY

26 . Magical realism 833 MARIANO SISKIND

27 . Palimpsest and hybridity in postcolonial writing 869 LENE M. JOHANNESSEN

28 . The narrative forms of postcolonial fiction 903 MONIKA FLUDERNIK

29 . Poetry and postcolonialism 938 JAHAN RAMAZANI

30 . Primitivism and postcolonial literature 982 VICTOR LI

Contents

31 . Popular culture and postcolonial literary production in Africa and India 1006 (a) Popular writing in Africa 1006 STEPHANIE NEWELL (b) Popular writing in India 1023 ABHIJIT GUPTA

32 . Film and postcolonial writing 1039 LINDIWE DOVEY

33 . Fanon, Memmi, Glissant and postcolonial writing 1068 ANJALI PRABHU

34 . Negritude and postcolonial literature 1100 H . ADLAI MURDOCH

35 . Publishing, prizes and postcolonial literary production 1127 SANDRA PONZANESI

36 . Key journals and organizations 1155 IRARAJAANDDEEPIKABAHRI

Bibliography 1189 Index 1307

Notes on contributors

D EEPIKA B AHRI is Associate Professor in the English department at Emory University. She is the author of Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (2003) and editor of Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality (1996), Realms of Rhetoric: Inquiries into the Prospects of Rhetoric Education (2003) and Empire and Racial Hybridity, a special issue of the journal South Asian Review. She is currently working on a project on the representation of Anglo-Indians, Eurasians and racial hybrids in postcolonial literature.

A NNE B REWSTER is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996) and Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1995). She co-edited with Fiona Probyn-Rapsey a special issue of Australian Humanities Review on whiteness (2007). She has published articles on whiteness and Aboriginal literature in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Australian Literary Studies, Feminist Theory and Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. She has book chapters which use experimental approaches to writing about whiteness in The Racial Politics of Bodies, Nations and Knowledges (2009), ed. Barbara Baird and Damien Riggs, and Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (2009), ed. Roger Dean and Hazel Smith. She has also published the innovative writing, using the methodology known as fictocriticism in Australia, in The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism (1998), ed. Heather Ker and Amanda Nettlebeck, and the electronic journal Outskirts: feminisms along the edge, TEXT, Cultural Studies Review and Australian Humanities Review.

G LENDA R. CARPIO is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University. Her book Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery was published in 2008. She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled ‘Ambivalent Alliances: Black and Latina/o Fiction in the Americas’.

Notes on contributors

J OE C LEARY is Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and Visiting Professor of English at Yale University. He was educated at NUI Maynooth and Columbia University, New York, where he studied with Edward W. Said. He is the author of Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (2007). He has also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (with Claire Connolly; Cambridge University Press, 2005). His articles on modern Irish writing and literary history have appeared in American, British and Irish journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Boundary 2, Textual Practice, The Irish Review and The Field Day Review.

E LIZABETH D E L OUGHREY is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (2007) and co-editor, with Renée Gosson and George Handley, of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (2005). Recently she completed an edited collection with George Handley entitled Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011).

L INDIWE D OVEY is Senior Lecturer in African Film and Performance Arts at SOAS, University of London. Her book, African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen (2009), was selected as a Choice outstanding academic title. She is founding director of the Cambridge African Film Festival; curating African film and making films have always been integral to her research. Her current interests are film festivals, postcolonial film and literature, and film and migration, and she has recently also launched an African Film Podcast series through OpenAir Radio at SOAS.

U ZOMA E SONWANNE is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. In addition to Critical Essays on Christopher Okigbo (2000), he has published numerous essays and interviews on African literature and popular culture, literature of the African diaspora, and literary theory and criticism in journals such as Cultural Critique, New Formations, African American Review, Research in African Literatures, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne Littérature Comparée and Postcolonial Text.

M ONIKA F LUDERNIK is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her major fields of interest include narratology, postcolonial studies, ‘Law and Literature’ and eighteenth-century aesthetics. She is the author of The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993), An

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Introduction to Narratology (2009) and the award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996).

D EBJANI G ANGULY is Head of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. She works in the areas of postcolonial literary and historical studies, and comparative/world literature in the era of globalization. Her other areas of research and publication include language worlds in South Asia, dalit life narratives, South Asian diasporic fiction, cultural histories of mixed race, and the globalization of Bollywood as a creative industry. Her books include Caste, Colonialism and Countermodernity (2005). She has edited Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (2007) and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives (2007). She is currently completing a monograph entitled Literary Worlds After 1989: Suffering Multitudes, Spectatorial Mediations. Debjani is an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of the UK and Ireland, and a member of the international advisory board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI).

G ARETH G RIFFITHS is Winston Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has authored and edited many books and articles on postcolonial issues. His books include A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writing Between Two Cultures (1978), African Literatures in English (East and West) (2000), Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies, co-edited with David Trigger (2003), Guanya Pau: A Story of an African Princess by J. J. Walters (1891), co-edited with Jamie John V. Singler (2004), Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions, edited with S. Scott (2005), and with Bill Ashcroft and Helen Tiffin The Empire Writes Back (1989, 2nd ed 2002), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995, 2nd edn 2005) and Key Concepts in Post- Colonial Studies (1998, 2nd edn 2007). He is currently working on a joint authored study of early indigenous Christians in postcolonial spaces and a study of texts by Africans educated in America in the late nineteenth and early centuries.

A BHIJIT G UPTA is Reader in English at Jadavpur University, Calcutta. His chiefareaofresearchisthehistoryofprintingandpublishing,andbibliog- raphy. He is the co-editor, along with Swapan Chakravorty, of the Book History in India series, of which two volumes have been published: Print Areas in 2004 and Moveable Types in 2008. He was also associate editor for South Asia of the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010). He has just completed an online database and location register of all books printed in Bengali from 1801 to 1867 and is currently at work on the period 1868–1914. His other

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research areas include science fiction,graphicnovels,crimefictionandthe nineteenth century.

D ANIEL H EATH J USTICE is a US-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and Associate Professor of English and Aboriginal Studies at the University of Toronto. In addition to numerous published essays on issues of Indigenous literary expression, he is the author of Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (2006), the Indigenous fantasy epic, The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles (2011) and a forthcoming cultural history of badgers.

P HILIP H OLDEN is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He researches and teaches life writing, and the historical development of literatures and associated cultural forms under colonialism, decolonization and global modernity – with a particular, although not exclusive, emphasis on Singapore and anglophone writing in Southeast Asia. His most recent books include Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State (2008) and The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (with Rajeev Patke, 2009). He is at present working on a project on W. Somerset Maugham and the limits of cosmopolitanism.

L ENE M. JOHANNESSEN is Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her areas of research and teaching are generally focused on literatures of and in migration and the ideological, cultural, social and aesthetic manifestations and negotiations of the en-route as these are refracted in narratives, specifically in American and postcolonial literature. Johannessen has written several articles and essays in the above areas, and is the author of Passage of Crisis: Threshold Time in Chicano Literature (2006) and the forthcoming Horizons of Enchantment: Essays in the American Imaginary (2011). She is also a member of the international research projects ‘Border Aesthetics’, ‘Uganda Folklore as Repository of Traditional Wisdom’ and ‘Literary Transculturations’.

A NANYA J AHANARA K ABIR is Professor of Humanities in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Her research interests range from investigations into the politics of memory in South Asia to the relationship between medievalism, modernity and the British Empire, and she is currently examining Latin American and South Asian postcolonialisms from a comparative perspective. She is the author of Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009) and co-editor, with Deanne M. Williams, of Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Notes on contributors

S ARA L ENNOX is Professor of German and Scandinavian Studies and Director of the Social Thought and Political Economy Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her recent research focuses on postcolonical and transnational approaches to German Studies and on peoples of the African diaspora in Germany. She is author of Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann (2006) and co-editor of The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (with Sara Friedrichsmeyer and Susanne Zantop, 1998) and Feminist Movements in a Globalizing World (with Silke Roth, 2002). In 2007–8 she was president of the German Studies Association. Together with Randolph Ochsmann of the University of Mainz, she was recipient of a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation of a collaborative project on Black European Studies and a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a project on Black German Studies. She is currently completing work on an edited book entitled Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics, and Culture.

V ICTOR L I is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on literary theory, postcolonial literatures, primitivism and globalization studies. The author of The Neo-primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity (2006), he has published widely in journals such as ARIEL, boundary 2, Criticism, CR: The New Centennial Review, Cultural Critique, Interventions and Parallax. He is the co-editor of The University of Toronto Quarterly and is on the editorial advisory boards of ARIEL, CR: The New Centennial Review and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. His current project is a critical examination of the repre- sentationalist ontology that underwrites discourses on globalization.

J OHN M C L EOD is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004) and J.G. Farrell (2007), and has edited The Revision of Englishness (2004) and The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2004). A second edition of his highly successful book Beginning Postcolonialism appeared in 2010. He has published scholarly articles on postcolonial and diasporic writing of Britain in a range of international journals, and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings and Adoption and Culture.

G ABRIELLA M AZZON is Chair for English Linguistics at the Institut für Anglistik, Leopold-Franzens Universität Innsbruck. Her main research interests

Notes on contributors

are connected to the field of varieties of English as a second language, especially in relation to the sociolinguistic value attached to the presence of English in such communities, and historical linguistics, especially in relation to historical socio- linguistics and pragmatics (forms of address, dialogic sequences), but also as concerns changes in forms (lexical change, history of negative forms). She has published extensively in both strands of research, and is currently working on Middle English dialogue and rhetoric, and on Post-Colonial English.

E LISABETH M UDIMBE-BOYI is Emerita Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her research and teaching focus on contacts of cultures; history and memory in literature; intellectuals, literature and politics. She is the author of Jacques-Stephen Alexis: une écriture poétique, un engagement politique (1992); Essais sur les cultures en contact: Afrique, Amériques, Europe (2006), and co-editor of Images, mémories et saviors: une histoire en partage (with Isidore Ndaywell, 2009). Among her other publications, she is the editor of Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds (2009), Remembering Africa (2002) and Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Culture, and the Challenge of Globalization (2002). Her current projects include La Révolution haitïenne et ses textes and Mémoire familiale: une histoire en fragments.

A NKHI M UKHERJEE is CUF (College University Fellow) Lecturer in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Wadham College. Her research and teaching interests include Victorian and modern literature, critical and cultural theory, particularly psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (2007), co-editor of A Companion to Literary Criticism and Psychoanalysis (2011), and has published articles on a wide variety of topics in refereed journals such as PMLA, MLQ and Textual Practice. Her current book project, ‘What is a Classic?’ Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon, examines ideas of canonicity, literary tradition, counter-readings, vernaculars and translation, the ‘anxiety of influence’, and nostalgia in twentieth- and twenty-first-century English literature. It focuses specifically on postcolonial literary production, the emergence of world literary systems, and the function of literary criticism in an international frame.

H.ADLAI M URDOCH is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His articles have appeared in Callaloo, Yale French Studies, Research in African Literatures, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, L’Esprit créateur,theJournal of Romance Studies and the Journal of

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Notes on contributors

Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.HeistheauthorofCreole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel (2001) and Creolizing the Metropole: Migratory Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film (2011). He is the co-editor of the essay collection Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies (2005).

J ULIAN M URPHET is Professor of Modern Film and Literature at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and the co-editor of Literature and Visual Technologies (2004). He has published on film, theory, race and literature in Critical Quarterly, SubStance and Screen.

M UHSIN AL-MUSAWI is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Studies at Columbia University, MESAAS. He has published extensively in English and Arabic. His books include: Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (1981), Anglo-Orient (2000), The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (2003), Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (2006), Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (2006), Islam on the Street: Religion in Modern Arabic Literature (2009) and The Islamic Context of the Thousand and One Nights (2009). He is the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature, and the recipient of the prestigious Owais Award in literary criticism.

M ARCOS P. NATALI is Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He is the author of A Política da Nostalgia: um estudo das formas do passado (2006) and has written on twentienth- century and contemporary Latin American literature and literary theory for journals and book collections in Brazil, Mexico, England and the United States.

S TEPHANIE N EWELL teaches postcolonial literature at the University of Sussex. She has published widely on West African literatures and colonial African print cultures, including The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku (2006) and West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (2006). Her recent work focuses on literary culture in colonial newspapers, particularly the uses of pseudonyms and anonymity in the West African press.

F RANCISCO A. ORTEGA is Associate Professor in the History Department and in the Cultural Studies graduate programme at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá. He obtained his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2000, where he specialized in Colonial Latin American studies and critical cultural theory. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University (1995–9) and an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2000–4). He

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Notes on contributors

edited an anthology on Michel de Certeau, La irrupción de lo impensado: Cátedra Michel de Certeau (2004) and a collection of essays by anthropologist Veena Das and local Colombian authors focusing on social violence, language and inter- pretation, Sujetos de dolor, agentes de dignidad (2008). He is currently based at the University of Helsinki working on the Research Project Europe 1815–1914 as a postdoctoral researcher, where he is completing a manuscript on the political culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Latin America.

R AJEEV S. PATKE is Professor of English Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens (Cambridge University Press, 1985, rpt 2009), Postcolonial Poetry in English (2006), and the co- author of The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (2009). His book on Modernist Literature and Postcolonial Studies is forthcoming in 2012. He has co-edited A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (2008), and also produced two audio compact discs of poetry from Singapore. His other publication and research interests include contemporary poetry from Ireland, the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, the cultures of modern cities, and the relation between poetry and painting.

B HEKIZIZWE P ETERSON is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has held invited Fellowships at Yale University and Birmingham University (UK) and served on various editorial, statutory and artistic committees, juries and boards across the continent. He is the author of Monarchs, Missionaries and Intellectuals (2000) and has published extensively on African literature, performance and cultural studies as well as black intellectual traditions in Africa and the diaspora. He has been active as a writer, activist and participant in Black cultural practices since the late 1970s and he was a founding member of the Afrika Cultural Centre and the Dhlomo Theatre. He is the writer and/or producer of internationally acclaimed films including the fea- tures Fools and Zulu Love Letter (directed by Ramadan Suleman) and the feature documentaries Born into Struggle and The Battle for Johannesburg (directed by Rehad Desai).

S ANDRA P ONZANESI is Associate Professor in Gender and Postcolonial Critique in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at the University of Utrecht. Among her interests are the reception of postcolonial literature in relation to the literary award industry and the exploration of digital literacies of migrant youth in transnational contexts. She has published on postcolonial critique, transnational feminist theories, Italian colonial history, visual culture

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and postcolonial cinema. Among her publications are Paradoxes of Post-colonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writing of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora (2004) and Migrant Cartographies New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-colonial Europe (with Daniela Merolla; 2005). She is currently working on a volume on Postcolonial Cinema Studies with Marguerite Waller (forthcoming 2011) and on Postcolonial Conflict Zones: Gender, Globalization and Violence.

A NJALI P RABHU is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and on the Board of the Cinema Studies Program at Wellesley College, where she has held the Whitehead Chair in Critical Thought. She works in the fields of postcolonial studies, cultural studies, francophone studies, African studies and cinema studies. She published Hybridity: Revisions, Transformations, Prospects (2007), while her forthcoming book is entitled Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora. Her work has appeared in Diacritics, Studies in Twentieth- Century Literature, Contemporary Literature Studies, Research in African Literatures, International Journal of Francophone Studies, Levinas Studies, Oeuvres et critiques, Présence Francophone and French Forum.

G.J.V PRASAD is Professor of Literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University. His research interests are Indian English literature, postcolonial literatures, contemporary theatre, dalit writings and translation theory. Prasad is also a poet and novelist. He has co-edited with Sara Rai a collection of stories from Indian languages, Imaging the Other (1999). His academic publications include Continuities in Indian English Poetry: Nation Language Form (1999) and four edited volumes of critical essays, Vikram Seth: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (2004), The Lost Temper: Essays on Look Back in Anger (2004), Translation and Culture: Indian Perspectives (2010) and Indian English and Vernacular India (co-edited, 2010). He edited the Penguin (now Longman) Study Edition of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (2004) and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (2005). His forthcoming publication is Writing India, Writing English (2011). Prasad is the current editor of JSL and Secretary of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies.

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African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (with Tejumola Olaniyan, 2007). He is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.

I RA R AJA teaches in the Department of English at the University of Delhi, India. She is currently on a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at La Trobe University, Australia. She has edited Grey Areas: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction on Ageing (2010), and co-edited with John Thieme, The Table is Laid: Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing (2007). Her essays have been published in Narrative, Women’sStudies, and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

J AHAN R AMAZANI is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize of the ACLA; The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001); Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self- Elegy, and the Sublime (1990). He edited the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and, with Jon Stallworthy, the eighth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature,volumeF,The Twentieth Century and After (2006). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, and the MLA’s William Riley Parker Prize.

E LAINE S AVORY formerly at the University of the West Indies, is now Associate Professor in Literary Studies at New School University, New York City. She has published widely on Caribbean and African literatures, especially poetry, drama and theatre, gender and literary history. She has a special interest in Jean Rhys, on whom she wrote The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Kamau Brathwaite, on whom she is in the process of completing an edited volume. She is also completing The Quarrel with Death: Elegiac Poetry in the Shadow of Empire, as well as an edition of the selected work of Bruce St John.

J AMIE S. SCOTT is Professor of Humanities and Director of the Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies at York University, Canada. Author of Christians and Tyrants: The Prison Testimonies of Boethius, Thomas More and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1995), he contributed essays to and edited And the Birds Began to Sing: Religion and Literature in Post-Colonial Cultures (1996), and co-edited Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Post-Colonial Literatures (with Paul Simpson-Housley, 2001), Canadian Missions, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad (with Alvyn Austen, 2005) and Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions (with Gareth Griffiths, 2005). He is currently working on a study of Christianity and film.

Notes on contributors

W INFRIED S IEMERLING is Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and an Associate of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard. His books include Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations (with Sarah Phillips Casteel, 2010), The New North American Studies (2005; French translation, 2010), Cultural Difference and the Literary Text (with Katherine Schwenk, 1996), Writing Ethnicity (1996), and Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard (1994). He is currently writing a book on the historical dimensions of African Canadian Literature.

M ARIANO S ISKIND is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He teaches nineteenth- and twentieth- century Latin American Literature with emphasis on its world literary rela- tions, as well as the production of cosmopolitan discourses and processes of aesthetic globalization. He is the editor (with Sylvia Molloy) of Poéticas de la distancia: adentro y afuera de la literatura argentina (2006) and has published essays in Comparative Literature Studies, Conradiana, Comparative Literature, Revista Iberoamericana, Variaciones Borges, Hispamérica, La Biblioteca and in several edited volumes. His book entitled Cosmopolitan Desires: Globalization and World Literature in Latin America will be published in 2012.

D OMINIC T HOMAS is Chair of the Department of French and Francophone Studies and Chair of Italian at the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of Nation-Building, Propaganda and Literature in Francophone Africa (2002) and Black France: Colonialism, Immigration and Transnationalism (2007). As editor, he has published Francophone Studies: New Landscapes (with Françoise Lionnet, 2003), Textual Ownership in Francophone African Literature (with Alec G. Hargreaves and Nicki Hitchcott, 2006), Global Francophone Africa (2009), Museums in Postcolonial Europe (2009), A Companion to Comparative Literature (with Ali Behdad, 2011), Francophone Sub-Saharan African Literature in Global Contexts (with Alain Mabanckou, 2011), and The Francophone Documentary (with Philippe Met, 2011). He is also the editor of the fiction in translation series ‘Global African Voices’ at Indiana University Press.

C HRISTOPHER W ARNES is Lecturer in the Faculty of English, and a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Recent publications include an essay on the Afrikaans novel in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (2009).

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Acknowledgments

As the Akan put it: he who cuts a path through the bush does not know when his back is crooked; only those behind him can tell. This maxim has been especially true for The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. I first of all wish to say a special thanks to the University of Toronto for providing the research funding support without which work on this project could not have taken place. My gratitude also goes to Robert Young, Rajeswari Sundar Rajan, Simon Gikandi, Abiola Irele, Linda Hutcheon, Jill Matus, Lynn Innes and Henry Louis Gates Jr for taking a look at the earliest version of the proposal and for various suggestions as to whom to invite. The Press’s assessors of the initial proposal made very helpful comments and to them also great thanks. Special thanks are also due to Winfried Siemerling, G. J. V. Prasad, Julian Murphet, Ananya Kabir, Rajeev Patke, Carina Ray, Valentina Napolitano and Kenneth Mills for reading a late draft of the introduction at very short notice and for the incisive suggestions they made for its improvement. Mohamed Awad and Claire Dunlop were invaluable research assistants as was Antonela Arhin, who came to the rescue on all things technological. Anikei Allen stepped in at the last minute with very helpful copy-editing contributions. A very big thanks also go to Ray Ryan, my editor at Cambridge, for initiating the project and nudging gently yet firmly along the way. I would also like to say a very special thanks to Kay McKechnie, the copy-editor assigned to the CHPL, who showed extra- ordinary patience along with a quite astounding attention to detail. It was a joy to work with such a professional. The final thanks go to Kamau, to whom the project is dedicated. Hopefully he will grow to understand a little bit of his father’s chosen madness that makes him in turns absent-minded, irritable and unaccountably hyperactive.

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Chronology

Historical and political events Literary and cultural events 1492 Columbus sails from Palos, Spain (3 Aug); discovers Watling Island in Bahamas (12 Oct); Cuba (18 Oct); Haiti (6 Dec) 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas: Spain and Portugal divide New World between them Parliament of Drogheda marks subservience of Ireland to England 1498 Vasco da Gama arrives in Calicut, India 1500 Pope Alexander VI proclaims a Year of Jubilee, and imposes a tithe for crusade against Turks Moorish revolt in Granada suppressed 1503 Casa Contrataccion (Colonial office) founded in Madrid to deal with American affairs Zanzibar becomes Portuguese colony 1510 Portuguese acquire Goa 1514 Septem horae canonicae first book published in Arabic type, published in Italy

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Chronology

1515 The Lateran Council’s decree, ‘De impressione librorum’, forbids printing of books without permission of Roman Catholic authorities 1518 The Barbary States of Algiers and Tunis founded 1521 Hernando Cortes assumes control of Mexico after destruction of Aztec state 1522 Spanish forces conquer Jacopo Sannazzaro, ‘De partu Guatemala Virginis’, religious poem fusing pagan and Christian myth 1526 Babar establishes Mogul dynasty in Delhi 1532 Francisco Pizarro leads expedition from Panama to Peru 1540 Afghan rebel Sher Shah becomes Emperor of Delhi 1547 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spanish writer, born (d. 1616) 1548 Gonzalo Pizarro, son of Francisco Pizarro, defeated at Battle of Xaquixaguane (Peru) by Pedro de la Gasca and executed 1555 French colony founded on the An Aztec dictionary published Bay of Rio de Janeiro 1560 Hsu Wei, Ching P’Ing Mei, first classic Chinese novel 1564 Spaniards occupy Philippines William Shakespeare born and build Manila (d. 1616) 1569 Alfonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, La Araucana, Spanish epic on the conquest of Chile

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Chronology

1572 Luís Vaz de Camões, Os Lusiados, Portuguese epic poem on voyages of Vasco da Gama 1575 Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, epic poems about the Crusades 1590 The Emperor of Morocco annexes Timbuctoo 1592 Portuguese settle at Mombasa 1595 Dutch begin to colonize East Indies 1596 Pacification of Ireland Merchant of Venice first performance (first printed 1600) 1598 Dutch take Mauritius 1599 Building of the Globe Theatre, Southwark, London, where Shakespeare’s plays are performed 1600 British East India Company founded 1601 Bento Teixeira Pinto, Prosopopya, first Brazilian epic 1603 Lord Mountjoy conquers northern counties of Ireland 1604 Othello first performance 1604–5 (first printed 1622) 1605 Cervantes, Don Quixote, part 1 published 1606 Antony and Cleopatra first performance between 1606 and 1607 (first printed 1623) 1610 Jesuit state of Paraguay created 1610 Skirmishes between English and Dutch settlers in India 1611 The Tempest first performance (first printed 1623)

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Chronology

1613 English colonists in Virginia destroy French settlement at Port Royal, Nova Scotia; prevent French colonization of Maryland 1615 Cervantes Don Quixote, part 2 1620 Pilgrim Fathers, leaving Plymouth, England, in Mayflower for North America, land at New Plymouth, Mass., to found Plymouth Colony 1625 French occupy the Antilles and Cayenne 1626 English author and traveller George Sandys makes first translation of a classic in America, Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1627 Shah Jahan (1592–1666), succeeding his father Jahangir, becomes Great Mogul of India (–1658) Barbados, West Indies, claimed as English colony 1628 Dutch occupy Java and Moluccas 1630 John Winthrop, English Puritan leader (1587–1649), sails with Plymouth Company’s expedition (Apr); arrives in Massachusetts with 1,000 settlers; founds Boston; 16,000 more settlers follow (–1642) 1632 Portuguese driven out of Bengal 1634 Island of Curaçao captured by Dutch forces 1635 Dutch occupy Formosa, English Virgin Islands, French Martinique

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Chronology

1636 Dutch settle in Ceylon 1640 French finish occupation of Alsace 1643 Confederation of New England formed by Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay Colony 1644 French occupy Rhineland 1645 Dutch occupy St Helena 1646 English occupy Bahamas 1649 England declared a commonwealth 1650 Dutch and English agree about respective frontiers of their North American colonies 1652 Dutch establish settlement in Cape Town 1654 Treaty of Westminster ends Anglo-Dutch War; Dutch recognize Navigation Act Portuguese finally drive Dutch out of Brazil 1655 English capture Jamaica from Spain 1656 Dutch take Colombo from Portuguese 1661 Famine in India, no rain since 1659 1663 Charles II grants charters to Royal African Company and to eight proprietors of North Carolina and Rhode Island 1664 Swedish colonies on Gold Coast given to Dutch 1666 French capture Antigua, Montserrat and St Christopher English privateers take Tobago

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Chronology

1668 British East India Company takes control of Bombay 1670 Spain formally cedes Jamaica to England 1669 Venetians lose Crete, their last colonial possession, to the Turks 1673 French expedition against Robert Clavel, Catalogue of All the Ceylon Books Printed in England Since the Dreadful Fire of London in 1666 1680 French colonial empire, reaching from Quebec to mouth of Mississippi River, is organized 1682 La Salle claims Louisiana territory for France and takes possession of Mississippi Valley 1683 Peace treaty between William Penn and North American Indians 1685 All Chinese ports open to Publication of Alexander Oliver foreign trade Esquemeling’s History of the Buccaneers of America 1686 Federation of New England formed by James II in order to remodel British colonies in North America French annex Madagascar 1687 Arguin, Guinea, established as colony by Brandenburg 1689 Natal becomes Dutch colony 1691 New East India Company formed in London 1693 National Debt begins in England 1697 French under André de Brue attempt to colonize West Africa

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Chronology

1707 Union between England and Scotland under name Great Britain 1708 British East India Company and New East India Company merged 1709 14,000 inhabitants of the Palatinate emigrate to North America (c. 100,000 Germans will follow during next 100 years, and 5 million during 1800s) 1710 Mauritius, formerly part of Dutch East Indies, becomes French 1711 Rio de Janeiro captured by French 1713 Spain agrees at Utrecht to cede Gibraltar and Minorca to Great Britain 1714 Tripoli becomes independent of Turkey 1719 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe Fray Francisco Ximénez translates fragments of Popol Vuh into Spanish 1726 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels 1749 Establishment of Halifax, Nova Scotia, as English fortress 1756 120 British soldiers imprisoned and die in India (‘Black hole of Calcutta’) Start of Seven Years’ War between English and French in North America that leads to the English acquisition of Quebec (–1763)

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Chronology

1760 Dutch explorer Jakobus Coetsee advances beyond Orange River, S. Africa 1763 British Proclamation provides government for Quebec, Florida and Grenada 1768 Secretary of State for Colonies appointed in Britain 1773 Boston Tea Party: protest against tea duty imposed by Britain 1774 Quebec Act, to secure Canada’s loyalty to Great Britain, establishes Roman Catholicism in Canada 1775 American Revolution (–1783) 1780 Rebellion in Peru against Spanish rule 1783 Britain recognizes independence of the US 1784 Pitt’s India Act; East India Phillis Wheatley, Black American Company under government poet, dies (b. 1753) control Founding of Asiatic Society 1787 Constitution of US signed Penal colony founded in Botany Bay, Australia 1788 Kālidāsa Shakuntala translated into English by William Jones 1789 The French Revolution; French Royalists begin to emigrate 1790 Canada Constitutional Act divides the country into two provinces, Upper and Lower Canada Slaves revolt in French Santo Domingo 1791 The Haitian Revolution (–1804)

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